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Retrospective: Reasons why you should love emacs

Last Saturday I was at Dominican College O&M’s campus at La Romana, as one of the speakers for the “OpenSaturday” series of events.

This was a complete success: full-room, engaged audience, excellent speakers.

I had the opportunity to give my first talk on emacs.

It was delivered using org-tree-slide-mode for one part — which was really cool for the audience and for me, too.

On the second half of the presentation, I used org-mode and demonstrated custom “ToDo” states and timestamps, org-mode html export (C-c C-e h H), syntax highlighting, Immediate mode, and Emmet mode. Of course, I demonstrated having multiple buffers open in several windows at the same time.

It was all in a hurry, because it was a 10-minute talk; I couldn’t demonstrate the keyboard macros – which would’ve been nice, as I was going to demonstrate an extraction of html form item names and the generation of php code to get it from the $_REQUEST superglobal; this makes use of emac’s ability to use search and all functions as part of the macro, which I know for a fact several editors can’t do.

The show-stealer was Emmet mode – I actually thought people would’ve been more surprised at noticing that the presentation was within emacs, but they weren’t. As many are CS students who are learning HTML, seeing html>(head>title)+body>div#content>ul>li*5 grow into the corresponding tree blew them away.

I’m planning to enhance that presentation to fill a 45-minute slot featuring keyboard macros, elisp functions + keybindings, and select parts of my .emacs file. Perhaps the presentation will be accompanied by a “Reasons to love Vi” by one of my colleagues, which would be sweet.

In any case, a great Saturday – hopefully things will keep on being fun.